Pokemons! I Choose You!

I choose... ah, who cares.

Pokemon Platinum: the must-have game of the season.
I was pretty ashamed to get so much enjoyment out of Pokemon back when it first came out and I was about 14 years old. How sad is it that I still play the games now that I am a grown man?
Worse than that is the fact that I persist with the Pokemon series even though quite early on I gleaned one important truth about the Pokemon games: they’re all the same!

I can’t be the only person who has noticed. And yet, review sites applaud the developers’ ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality. I think those reviewers are just searching for a reasonable explanation for why they still enjoy this repetitive mass-marketing gimmick of a game. Incremental changes happen from one iteration to the next (what? Pokemon ribbon contests? Where do I sign up!) But the core mechanics remain very much the same.
But this is not even the problem. After all, how many great series have been ruined by ill-advised changes to the mechanics?

What irks me is that you can’t apply the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality to story. Sure, themes, settings, re-occurring characters. That’s all fine, but the whole thing? Why is there even a Japanese guy’s name listed under story in Pokemon credits nowadays?!

Seriously, watch this:
Boy (or girl. Next gen addition!) lives boringly in small village.
He meets professor who gives him a choice of three pokemon (grass, fire or water only!)
Boy is tasked with finding, like, every damn pokemon on the planet AND at the same time becoming the super pokemon master of the world. This is the manga equivalent of winning the Ultimate Fighting Championship with the aid of a paperclip while simultaneously locating the Loch Ness Monster and the Yeti in the undersea kingdom of Atlantis. Make something a priority, Professor!
Your best friend, and also hyperactive pain in the butt, vows to prove that he is better than you like all best friends and runs off to do the exact same thing you are doing. Now I’m no scientist, but if you have two massive tasks that you would like taken care of, and two fresh-faced young scamps to do those tasks then why wouldn’t you give them a task each?
Boy goes to all the cities in his tiny world, facing the challenge of the Pokemon gym leaders who, despite being the best pokemon trainers on the planet, haven’t mastered the concept of elemental strengths and weaknesses. How did you climb to the top of the competitive pokemon industry by using six pokemon made of grass? It takes one fire-breathing pony to utterly destroy you! The gym leader’s explanation for their ridiculous choice is that they ‘like’ that type of pokemon. You know what type I like? The ones that let me win! That ‘I like them’ attitude is not how winners operate.
Oh, meanwhile you somehow get involved in stopping some conspiracy haphazardly thrown into play by Team INSERTSCARYGANGNAMEHERE to kidnap every pokemon on the planet and have them print money or defraud the government or something equally horrid.
Having slaughtered the gym leaders, and demolished some plot to do something dastardly with Pokemon, Boy goes all the way to the Final Four – Four trainers who – despite having no gym of their own – kick way more butt than those lame gym leaders. This might be because you have to fight all four of them in a row. Then you become the Poke Champ or something and you win. Because you abandoned the ridiculous ‘Find all the pokemon’ quest hours ago.

See what I just did? I wrote the story of every Pokemon game ever, including any subsequent sequels. Some royalties please, Nintendo?
Would it be too much to ask that something, *anything* could change in the typical Pokemon storyline? But Pokemon is not about story. And they’re shifting units so what’s the harm, right?

At the end of the day, I tell myself I won’t bother with the next one, but I still do. I still play them. I don’t know why!

A Boy and his Blog!

It looks like things might be turning around for the Nintendo Wii. I stumbled across the news on a gaming blog that A Boy and his Blob is being re-released.
I remember playing this when I was, like, 8 years old. Good times!
It was about a boy who just kind of came across this blob thing from space (they didn't really worry too much about story back then) and he found out that he could feed the blob jellybeans and it would turn into a ladder, or a hot air balloon, or a hole, or all kinds of great stuff! It made no sense, especially when you consider how you learn that a blob from space even likes jellybeans. What old school games lacked in story they made up for in sheer ridiculous difficulty! I remember it being really, really hard. They don't really do that with games nowadays, but I hope they don't make the remake too straightforward. (Remember Battletoads!?) And I'm glad to see they seem to have kept that old sense of whimsy and haven't tried to 'grow up' the series. Like, I'm thinking you don't feed him a napalm jellybean and he turns into a flamethrower or anything.
The graphics on the Wii are looking great. Throw in some story and I think you've got a winner. Of course, I don't actually have a Wii, so... Hmm.


The original Boy (and his Blob) embarking on his poorly scripted original adventure. Back when kids didn't need wimpy things like faces on their video game characters, just a litte black dot to see by.
I actually remember being fully impressed by the backgrounds in this game when it came out


The new Boy. He has a Blob too. And a face! Spoiled!!

Space Bread

This week I found out that, according to an astronaut, in space you are not allowed to have bread because the crumbs float around at zero gravity into your eye!

Now that I am learning Chinese I could try and become a Chinese citizen, train as a fighter pilot, get on the Chinese space programme, boom! Space.
But I would miss bread too much.



Doo-doo-doo-doo, space bread!

On the Road... the wind in the sand in my hair...

I've been doing a lot of travelling recently.
In the last two weeks I can cross off Auckland's North Shore, Katikati, Waihi and Raglan as places I have now visited and escaped from relatively unscathed!

Personalised plates: they're pretty popular nowadays, and people are getting a bit reckless with them, in my opinion. Obviously there aren't as many options as their used to be unless we start inventing new, retarded words to put on them.
I propose that personalised plates, like the text messages of the semi-illiterate, are a kind of linguistic rorschach test. I will give you an example.
I witnessed the following personalised plate a few weeks back:
NDLGNS
I take it as a challenge to my manliness to try and figure out what these plates mean, so I put my brain to work. I decided that the car was owned by an IT company, and the plate said NeeD LoGiNs?
But I was wrong. And my wrongness incensed me, because my answer - to me at least - made perfect sense. So I sought a second opinion.
Having written the offending license plate down, I showed it to Miss D. She pondered for a while and came up with NeeDLeGuNS, which would be a perfect plate for someone who loved Halo too much.
What did the plate really say? iNDuLGeNSe (sic)
Obviously!

Impending Separation...

As part of the Chinese Language scholarship I was awarded in August, I leave for China in a little under two weeks.
Such an event requires meticulous planning. Think about it: I'm going to be away from my iTunes for over a month!
I've downloaded a couple of full albums (Fall Out Boy and Nickelback) and some single tracks (Flyleaf, Escape the Fate, Story of the Year, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus). I've also put the best tracks from some of my favourite artists (Foo Fighters, 311, Weezer, Fun Lovin' Criminals) into playlists - call them my own 'greatest hits' collections, although usually the songs I like best are neither singles nor hits.
I hope it's enough to tide me over...
The new Fall Out Boy album, Folie a Deux is well worth a listen. I'm digging the riffing of America's Suitehearts and the retrospective outro of What a Catch, Donnie at the moment. There's an element of extra value in any Fall Out Boy album because half the tracks require you to guess what the heck their title means.

On the trip to Beijing I will be accompanied by the lovely Mrs Powley. Please check out our adventures at the following blog:
www.chicketychinathechinesechicken.blogspot.com
And pass it on to anyone else you know who might be keen to tune in and see if I survive. I won't make any bold promises about how frequently I'll update (this time!) but I'm only there for three weeks, so I'll have to be on the ball.
Merry Christmas to all. Yes, even you.

The Problem with Music Videos...

Back to music this time.
So I love music. No doubts there. But they don’t make it easy, do they?
I find it hard to watch music videos nowadays, because of two things that wind me up immensely. I think you’ll agree that both are an equally dangerous blight on the music industry. I have included links to all the videos so you can be similarly outraged, if that is your thing.

#1 – The Product Placement
Is it not enough that we have to contend with ad breaks every 8 minutes on TV? Now we have products shoved in our faces during music videos.
Instead of ‘Say (All I Need)’, I’m surprised OneRepublic didn’t name their single ‘LaCoste provide footwear for our whole band. Thanks, LaCoste!’ Who knew shoes were so essential for rocking!(Check the video at 1:34, 2:08, 2:43, 3:07, 3:14)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pye5Uh6XqZc

Katy Perry’s new song goes one better – she not so surreptitiously endorses two products in her latest video ‘Hot N Cold’. (Diesel sunnies at 1:49, 1:57, and a Nokia phone at 2:54, 2:56-58, 3:03-3:06)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-LhyAVzDBI

These are not bad songs. Is it really necessary to plug luxury items to make enough money to be a super-famous music star? These are not bad videos. But every time I see them I cringe at what is just blatant product placement. I’m a little embarrassed for these artists, you know? It’s like watching Big Bird tell you that “today’s show was brought to you by the letters B, I, and new Coke Zero! Same Coke flavour, no sugar!” It just isn’t right. The video should showcase these bands’ talent, not their marketing savvy.
Of course there’s no such thing as bad publicity, apparently. The mere fact that I’ve devoted about an hour of my life to writing this probably goes some way to proving that point. Oh dear, it’s probably time to move onto…

#2 – The Pussycat Dolls
Did you know if you take a lump of clay, form it into basic woman shapes and then ask Satan enough times, he will make you some Pussycat Dolls of your very own?
They’re like the punch line to a bad joke. “Hey, Bill, you’ll love this one. How many models does it take to sing a pretty average pop song?”
“Well, Ted, shouldn’t it take just one? Maybe two if they wanna do some harmonies or something. No more than three, surely.”
“Then what the hell are five sixths of the Pussycat Dolls for?”
“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! You kill me, Ted.”
‘I Hate this Part’, their latest effort, has skyrocketed them to new levels of ridiculousness, as Nicole, the ‘band’s’ lead singer and possibly the only one who knows how to string a melody together, harmonises with herself. Five women in the video, but only one sings. She even has to play the piano at the same time. If I was her, I’d be pissed. And if the music industry is in as dire trouble as we are led to believe, then stop paying the four useless ones!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rN4f0J6oQA

As you know, every Pussycat Dolls video in their short history of mediocrity ends with them stripping off at least one layer of clothing. This video ends with an unexpected downpour of rain that soaks their remaining skimpy outfits. This is the visual equivalent of the one semitone key change in every Westlife song ever. You hope it won’t happen this time, but you’re really not surprised when it does. “Oh, now they’re wet,” you say. “Yawn.” It’s so completely expected that you can’t help but sigh when they meet your basement-level expectations.

We are on the brink of disaster here, people. Sooner or later the Pussycat Dolls will start endorsing their special brand of hooker-wear in their music videos. And that will be the end of the music industry as we know it. Nature abhors a vacuum, and it doesn’t get much more vacuous than that.

My Sky Shaped Box

I read a book the other week called Heart-Shaped Box. I was intrigued by the title, which I assumed was a reference to the Nirvana song. I was sort of right, but sort of wrong too. This is fine, because it was a fantastic story.
In this book, a man is pursued by a ghost that he purchased off the internet.
In one scene the protagonist notes that the ghost is visible and dangerously active while the sun is obscured by cloud. But it cannot stand the light, and when the sun breaks through the clouds the ghost is rendered intangible and ineffective by it.
To me, this rang true as a great metaphor for Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). While I am by no means one of those people who jumps on the internet to self-diagnose themselves the minute they have the sniffles I have wondered for some time how much the light of the sun affects my mood, my desire to hide myself away from the world.
There are days when I feel like I am lord of all I survey. There are other days when I feel like I am lord of all I survey so long as all I survey is the inside of my house with the curtains closed and the doors locked.
Bring on the summer sun!